Challenges of homeschooling regulation in Brazil: the conservative movement and attacks on public school

• In Event: Contested Educational Policies: Power, Segregation, and Equity in Comparative Perspective

Proposal

During the 19th century, home education was common in Brazil, especially among the upper classes that adopted this type of education in a patriarchal and colonizing model. Brazilian elites provided primary education and other classes at home predominantly involving private educators, who were hired to teach knowledge and skills of interest to the family and the child (Vasconcelos, 2021).
Later, with the beginning of the republican period, campaigns for compulsory and free school education gained strength. The Federal Constitution of 1988, which is still in force, established the mandatory school enrollment and attendance for children and adolescents aged from 4 to 17 years as part of the right to education.
However, since the 2000s, the demand for homeschooling has increased in Brazil, influenced by the experience in the United States of America and its discourse in favor of the freedom of parental choice in relation to child education (Author, 2016).
Despite the growth of this type of privatized education, Brazilian public schools remain the only means of access to education for a large part of the population. However, while schools play an important role, public education is under constant attack from private and conservative actors that compete for public resources and ideological space.
Therefore, this article aimed to analyze how conservative discourses and attacks on Brazilian public schools are related to supporting the regulation of homeschooling in Brazil. The methodological procedures used were literature review and document and discourse analysis to investigate “the perspectives on which the social relationship of power is built at the discursive level” (Rocha & Deusdará, 2005, p. 321). The bibliographic research was conducted at the Observatório de Educação Domiciliar e Desescolarização (OEDD), which provides a repository of academic works sourced from SciELO, CAPES, ICHER, Google Scholar, and ERIC. The keywords used for the search were homeschooling and home education (in English and Portuguese). The documents analyzed include legal texts, official guidelines from educational policies and claims made by different associations for and against the homeschooling movement.
The data analyzed reveal that in Brazil, some homeschooling advocates attack public education in order to defend their interest in regulating this practice in the country. In addition, the movement has created conservative alliances to achieve its goals (Cechetti & Tedesco, 2020). For Apple (2003, p. 220), the movement in favor of homeschooling can only be understood if we link it to “[…] the history of the attack on the public sphere in general and on the government (the State) in particular.” According to Monk (2009), these criticisms are linked to an individualistic approach to children's education, which has created tensions between families and policymakers.
Since the 1990s, several Brazilian bills aimed to regulate homeschooling in the country. A significant part of these bills were not approved because it considered school not only as a space for the acquisition of knowledge but also as an essential element for socialization and development of citizenship values in the context of the democratic rule of law (Author, 2016).
However, during the government of the former President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), discussions about homeschooling were significantly expanded and this topic was considered as a priority measure, associated with other conservative projects. Also during this period, a bill 3179/2012 for the regulation of homeschooling in Brazil was approved by the Chamber of Deputies and is currently awaiting approval by the Federal Senate. Through the same ideological discourses National Congressmen through its parliamentarians, has been expressing an anti-statist position, claiming that the State is unable to provide adequate public education to the population, thus justifying homeschooling as a solution to this problem.
The controversies surrounding the homeschooling regulation is a phenomenon has been observed not only in Brazil but across Latin America, with “the advance of a ‘right-wing wave,’ which is a new interpretation of liberalism and conservatism […] (the two traditional ideological families in thought and politics in the region since the 19th century)” (Pereira da Silva, 2018, p. 170). Inevitably, this ideological current in the region has a direct impact on education and is linked to the phenomenon of privatization.
In conclusion, it is important to highlight that in Brazil, conservative and privatization-oriented discourses have been used to defend homeschooling, creating a complex and dangerous scenario as they use these discourses to attack public schools and blame them for a number of social problems. Such speeches ignore those who live in precarious socioeconomic conditions or in situations of vulnerability, who represent the majority of the Brazilian population and who therefore have public schools as their only form of access to education.

Authors

• Isabela Mallis Martinho de Araujo, University of Campinas

• Luciane Muniz Ribeiro Barbosa, University of Campinas

• Fabiana Barros De Martin, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas

• Isabela Fernandes Teles